Archive

In which recent events, create an unanticipated “fork in the road” for my career.

The Ending (at the beginning)

If you’ve been following me for any length of time at all, you’ll realise that recent events have had an effect on my day-to-day life.

What I’ve been doing in 2022 (so far)

If you’ve been a subscriber or read previous issues of my newsletter, the format is a little different (for reasons explained in the first section). This is an irregular edition to bring things up-to-date across my various channels.

Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here.

Preamble: my content

This week, it is going to be a fairly “direct, and to-the-point” newsletter. No musical interludes, no “older” stories. I didn’t get a lot of writing of my own done last week, although I started on some new personal projects, of which more soon; and I’ll be taking some time off from some others.

One fun thing this past weekend, has been learning to play Wingspan, one of the most popular boardgames from 2019/2020 (if you also enjoy boardgames, find me on BoardGameGeek).

I’ve made another adjustment to the newsletter itself, with the new formatting that is available. Apart from that, without major preamble, without extended personal content, here’s what caught my eye since last Monday.

Links I found interesting

Hello again. It’s Monday, and it’s March. Happy Women’s History Month! Also a bit of a less happy milestone, marking a whole year of not stepping foot inside my office here in London. What a year it has been…

As I continue to experiment with this format, I’ve asked for feedback! Thanks for passing it on. I’ve had some useful comments so far, so I’ll be changing things up a little bit. A reader suggested I could be a bit more restrained with formatting, and also think about how the links get incorporated into the flow of things, so let me know whether this week’s newsletter flows better, or whether I should think again.

On with my observations and discoveries, from the last week of February…

Longer-form content from me, this week

Having family and friends in Texas, I’ve spent some time reading about that over the past week. On the “day job” side I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about authentication, APIs and code documentation and samples.

Longer-form content from me, this week

Episode 309 — Cardboard Doom to Khazad-dûm

In this week’s podcast we geek out about rovers and drones on Mars, Andy Baio’s new virtual meetings space called Skittish, and the usual assortment of AR, LEGO, and sci-fi/fantasy TV stuff. Also, the power situation in Texas, of which, more in the additional links,

gamesatwork.biz

Links I found interesting

Happy mid-February!

Thank you for the comments on last week’s newsletter - interesting to know how things are developing, and what catches your attention.

Longer-form content from me, this week

I’ve been podcasting…

Well, if the “new” world of newsletters is going to be any, for me, it’s likely to be a slow burner.

I remember Roo’s Letter was a fun weekly distraction, and Benedict Evans has had one for the longest time… Going even further back, Delicious used to post a weekly summary of links on my Twitter feed for me. These days, I bookmark / curate links into several Flipboard publications of my own, and otherwise, I Tweet (a LOT). For the last several years I’ve wished I never lost the habit of blogging / longer-form writing, and although I’m kicking off 2021 in a better mindset, I still often find it hard to get back to. Also, when I do choose to write something longer now, I’m faced with a (self-inflicted) choice of trying to decide between my WordPress site, Medium, or DEV.

All of this is to reflect on the fact that my first issue 10 days ago, was probably less engaging than I could have made it - for example, I could at least have added some context as to why what I was sharing, was interesting to me at the time. I’ll try to do a little better at that, if I keep this thing going, it is still just a personal experiment.

I would genuinely be curious to know whether a) you took a look, either via a web link or through subscribing, and b) whether you find a format like this in any way useful. Is this all too “Back to the Future”? Tweet at me.

Hello! Over the course of the average week, I share a decent number of links across various social channels, usually because they are interesting, thought-provoking, of useful. So I thought I’d try aggregating them together, in case this is a helpful additional way of sharing and summarising what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Longer-form content from me, this week

Raspberry Pi Pico - getting excited about the smallest things! - DEV Community